The statements in this section may serve as a background to help understand the invention and its application and uses, but may not constitute prior art.
Modern computing technology have brought in a new era of immersive experiences with virtual reality. Whether playing a video game or watching a sports event, immersion enhances the experience by making it more realistic, engaging, and interactive, with images, sounds, and haptic feedbacks that simulate the user's presence in a virtual three-dimensional (3D) environment. Virtual reality has seen uses in applications such as gaming, movies and television, architecture, and telepresence, yet ground-up development of virtual reality content for mass mainstream adoption is still non-trivial and expensive. Within the gaming universe, converting existing video games and eSport platforms into their VR counterparts is equally challenging, as traditional controls and user interfaces often do not work well in VR, while simulation sickness and latency also need to be taken into account. Moreover, 360-degree rendering and recording of an existing 3D game is generally too resource intensive for low-end platforms or user devices, where rendering, compressing, and streaming of VR videos necessitate high processing power, careful memory management, and bandwidth optimization. Moreover, production-ready offline rendering systems can produce 360 stereoscopic panorama videos for game replay in a VR environment, but such systems are generally incapable of real-time live game play capture and streaming.
Therefore, in view of the aforementioned difficulties, there is an unsolved need to make it easy to capture and record real-time live game plays of existing video games, and stream, replay or even live-play in a virtual reality environment.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.